Before you begin

You can choose to upgrade using the installer, or, if the installer is not suitable for your situation you can use an archive file to update your Bitbucket Server instance. Only use an archive file to update Bitbucket Server if the installer is not suitable for your situation, as the installer is the the recommended approach to upgrade for most use cases.

In Bitbucket 5 we changed where you configure properties such as port numbers, context paths, and access protocol (among other things) to centralize custom configuration to a single directory and file, and to make upgrading easier for future releases.

Upgrading from any version earlier than or including Bitbucket Server 4.14 to Bitbucket Server 5.0 or later requires that you manually migrate any changes to the server.xml file to the bitbucket.properties file.

If your users rely on particular apps, you may want to wait until they are compatible before upgrading Bitbucket. App vendors generally update their apps very soon after a major release.

Good to know:

Upgrading from a version older than Bitbucket Server 6 will automatically disable all user-installed apps. You will need to enable your apps after successfully upgrading, regardless of compatibility with Bitbucket Server 6.

Upgrade Bitbucket

This upgrade process does not perform an in-place upgrade, but instead installs the new version of Bitbucket Server into a new installation directory. The new instance uses your existing Bitbucket Server home directory and external database.

If necessary, rolling back an upgrade can only be performed by restoring a backup of both the Bitbucket Server home directory and the Bitbucket Server database – rolling back requires a consistent home directory and database. You can then reinstall the previous version of the application to the installation directory. Read the Rollback section for more details.

5. Back up your data

For Bitbucket Server (version 4.8 or later) instances, you can use Zero Downtime Backup, the Backup Client (version 2.7 or later), or DIY Backup (version 2.12 or later) while Bitbucket is running, or just stop Bitbucket and zip up / snapshot the home directory and database and keep them somewhere safe.

For Bitbucket Data Center (version 4.8 or later) instances, you can use Zero Downtime Backup, DIY Backup, or take snapshots of the shared home directory (on NFS) and database while all nodes are stopped.

For Bitbucket mirrors, the home directory doesn't store any persistent state that can't be reconstructed from the primary Bitbucket instance, but you should still make sure you have a backup of at least the important configuration files such as SSL certificate, server.xml, config/ssh-server-keys.pem, bitbucket.properties file, and so on in a safe place. See How do I back up my mirrors? for more information.

6. Migrate customizations

Since Bitbucket 5, custom server configurations have been kept in a different location. Previously, Tomcat container customizations were made in the server.xml file, located in either the <Bitbucket home directory>/shared directory (from 3.8 to 4.14), or in <Stash installation directory>/conf (for 3.7 and earlier).

If you are upgrading from Bitbucket Server 4.14 or earlier, then you must do the the following:

First, determine if you've made customizations to your server.xml file. You would have made these changes if you modified the port, context path, or the access protocol, or if you are running Bitbucket Server behind a proxy and modified the Connector element.

N/A, replaced by <Bitbucket home directory>/shared/bitbucket.properties

If you made any customizations to the server.xml file, you must migrate those changes in the bitbucket.properties file in your existing Bitbucket home directory. The bitbucket.properites file uses a slightly different syntax, so it is not merely a copy and paste procedure.

Bitbucket Data Center instances on version 3.8 or later, the single server.xml file in the <Bitbucket home directory>/shared directory replaces all the copies of server.xml located in the <Bitbucket installation directory>/conf directories of the cluster nodes using previous versions of Bitbucket Server (or Stash).

Rollback

If necessary, rolling back an update can only be performed by restoring a backup of both the Bitbucket Server home directory and the Bitbucket Server database – rolling back requires a consistent home directory and database. You can then reinstall the previous version of the application to the installation directory. Never start an older binary against an upgraded home directory.

Version-specific update notes

This section provides specific update notes for each version of Bitbucket Server. These notes supplement the primary upgrade instructions above. You should read the relevant sections for each version between your current version of the application and the version you are upgrading to.

Starting from Bitbucket Server 5.0, some startup scripts had their name prefixed with an underscore. These scripts have been deprecated, and you should no longer call these scripts directly. This is to avoid confusion, because previously there were multiple start and stop scripts, making it easy to confuse which one to call. Now, there is only one script, that begins with "start" and one that begins with "stop".

In Bitbucket Server 5.0, some startup scripts have had their name prefixed with an underscore. These scripts have been deprecated, and you should no longer call these scripts directly. This is to avoid confusion, because previously there were multiple start and stop scripts, making it easy to confuse which one to call. Now, there is only one script, that begins with "start" and one that begins with "stop".

BitbucketServer does not support reverse proxies using AJP connections

Starting from version 5.0, Bitbucket Server does not support reverse proxies using AJP connections. While never officially supported, previous versions of Bitbucket Server could use AJP connections. However, with changes to how Bitbucket Server uses Tomcat, using AJP connections with Bitbucket Server (or Data Center) 5.0+ will cause the application to fail on startup.

Any version after Git 2.11.0 (including future 2.12+ releases) cannot be used with Bitbucket Server. Bitbucket Server 4.12 will fail on startup if Git 2.11+ is detected. Only upgrade to versions of Git which are explicitly marked supported on our Supported Platforms page.

Do you rely on user-installed add-ons?

Your plugins may not be compatible with Bitbucket Server 4.0 (yet)

Upgrading from Stash to Bitbucket Server will disable all user-installed add-ons, whether they are 3rd-party add-ons from Atlassian Marketplace, or your own custom add-ons. User-installed add-ons will need to be checked, upgraded and enabled again once you've finished the upgrade process. You should check the marketplace listing for 3rd-party add-ons to determine if there is a release that is compatible with Bitbucket Server 4.0. Unless they have been updated to work with Bitbucket Server 4.0, existing add-ons (or plugins) that use the API interfaces that have been removed in Bitbucket Server 4.0 will not work. Similarly, custom add-ons need to be upgraded for Bitbucket Server compatibility. See the documentation on how to update your add-on for details.

If you are upgrading from Stash 3.x to Bitbucket Server 4.x, you should be aware that most user-installed add-ons will be incompatible with Bitbucket Server 4.0. After upgrading, go to Admin > Manage add-ons, look for messages of this form, and follow the advice to update:

If no newer version is available the add-on will remain disabled.

New dedicated user account 'atlbitbucket'

A new dedicated user account will be created to run Bitbucket Server, called atlbitbucket. During the upgrade process, you will have an option to delete the dedicated user account for running Stash, named atlstash. For most users, deleting this dedicated user account won't have any negative consequences, however if you rely on this dedicated user accounts, for example in custom backup scripts, you will need to update the user account in those scripts.

Updates to logger names

If you have customized your logging configuration by manually editing the logback.xml file (using steps found in the Configure Stash Logging KB article), you should be aware of changes to several logger names that may require you to update some of your configuration files.

Important security improvement which may require configuration changes

Previous to Bitbucket Server 4.0, a security constraint for redirecting from HTTP to HTTPS was not enforced, meaning users could type "http://<bitbucketserver-url>" into their browser and still be shown a functioning version of Bitbucket Server (or Stash). Included with the release of Bitbucket Server 4.0 was a fix to enforce that security constraint. Using the previous security configuration with Bitbucket Server 4.0 means trying to access the application over an insecure connection, when users type "http" when trying to get to the application, they could encounter erroneous behavior.

As part of upgrading from Stash to Bitbucket Server, it is recommended you update your security configuration in order to avoid encountering this problem. See this Knowledge Base article for more information and specific instructions on addressing this: Redirect HTTP Requests to HTTPS.

If you have installed the stash-stream-guard-plugin (for example, if advised to do so by Atlassian Support), then you should uninstall it when upgrading to 3.11.2 as its functionality is now bundled in Stash.

Are you using Git 2.2x - 2.4.0?

Git 2.2.x - 2.4.0 have reported performance issues when interacting with NFS. Hence, these versions are currently not supported for Stash Data Center or for Stash Server installations that use NFS mounts for the home directory.

Are you using JIRA as a Crowd server?

Stash 3.9 cannot use JIRA 6.4 as a Crowd server due to a bug in JIRA 6.4. Please upgrade to JIRA 6.4.1 before upgrading Stash. (Note that Stash 3.7.2 and 3.8.0 contained a workaround for the bug but the workaround was removed in Stash 3.9)

Have you made customizations to Tomcat's server.xml file?

For Stash 3.8 (and future versions) the server.xml file is now located in the <stash home directory>/shared directory. The benefit of this move is that your customizations to server.xml will not have to be redone for future upgrades.

You still need to update your custom configurations in shared/server.xml for the upgrade to Stash 3.8.

Deprecation of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting

The highlighting engine was changed in Stash 3.5 from HighlightJS to CodeMirror. The use of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting in Stash is now deprecated, and will be removed in Stash 4.0. See Syntax highlight changes for information about how to migrate any custom mappings for HighlightJS that you may have made.

Do you use JIRA 6.4?

JIRA 6.4 has a known issue with Stash versions 3.4.3 to 3.7.1, which prevents the user synchronization from working. This will only affect you if you use JIRA to manage your users in Stash, and is fixed in Stash 3.7.2.

Deprecation of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting

The highlighting engine was changed in Stash 3.5 from HighlightJS to CodeMirror. The use of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting in Stash is now deprecated, and will be removed in Stash 4.0. See Syntax highlight changes for information about how to migrate any custom mappings for HighlightJS that you may have made.

Note that if you use either SMTP with STARTTLS or SMTPS and connect to a self-signed mail server you may need to import the server's certificate and set up a custom cacerts file for Stash (just as you do for any outbound SSL/TLS connection to a self-signed server). See this Stash knowledge base article for information about how to do that.

Deprecation of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting

The highlighting engine was changed in Stash 3.5 from HighlightJS to CodeMirror. The use of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting in Stash is now deprecated, and will be removed in Stash 4.0. See Syntax highlight changes for information about how to migrate any custom mappings for HighlightJS that you may have made.

Stash home directory location

Stash 3.5 and later versions no longer allow the Bitbucket Server home directory to be the same directory as, or a subdirectory of, the Stash installation directory. The Stash home directory, as defined by the STASH_HOME environment variable, must be in a separate location – Stash will fail on startup otherwise.

Deprecation of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting

The highlighting engine in Stash has been changed from HighlightJS to CodeMirror. The use of HighlightJS for syntax highlighting in Stash is now deprecated, and will be removed in Stash 4.0. See Syntax highlight changes for information about how to migrate any custom mappings for HighlightJS that you may have made.

Changed group membership aggregation with multiple user directories

Stash 3.4 uses new schemes to determine the effective group memberships when Stash is connected to multiple user directories, and duplicate user names and group names are used across those directories. The new schemes are:

'aggregating membership'

'non-aggregating membership'.

These group membership schemes are only used to determine authorization. Authentication is determined on the basis of the group mappings in each directory.

When you update to Stash 3.4, an update task will apply one of those schemes as follows:

Aggregating membership will be applied to your instance:

If there is only one active directory.

If there are multiple active directories but only a single directory applies group memberships to any particular user.

For example, if directory-1 contains user-a in group-x, and directory-2 contains user-b in group-y, then Stash 3.4 will apply aggregating membership, and permissions will not be affected.

Non-aggregating membership will be applied to your instance:

If there are multiple active directories and more than one directory applies group memberships to at least one user.

For example, if directory-1 contains user-a in group-x, and directory-2 contains user-a in group-y, then Stash 3.4 will apply non-aggregating membership. If group-y has admin provileges then user-a would have their privileges escalated in this case if aggregating membership was applied instead when upgrading to Stash 3.4.

Any changes made by the update task will be logged.

A Stash admin can change the membership scheme used by Stash using the following commands:

To change to aggregating membership, substitute your own values for <username>, <password> and <base-url> in this command:

Note that changing the aggregation scheme can affect the authorization permissions for your Stash users, and how update operations are performed. Read more about using Stash with multiple use directories.

Home directory migration

When you update to Stash 3.2 or later, an update task migrates directories in your Stash home directory to new locations. This is irreversible – once you update to Stash 3.2 or later you can not revert to Stash 3.1 or earlier, because of changes to the Stash home directory format.

The interfaces in the Stash API for plugin developers that were deprecated in Stash 2.11 and earlier have been removed in Stash 3.0. This means that, unless they have been updated to work with Stash 3.0, existing Stash add-ons (or plugins) that use these interfaces will not work with Stash 3.0.

Please see the section below about Stash add-on incompatibilities for more details.

Stash add-on incompatibilities

Unless they have been updated to work with Stash 3.0, existing Stash add-ons (or plugins) that use the API interfaces that have been removed in Stash 3.0 will not work.

Fresh installs of Stash 3.0 shouldn't encounter any problems. The Stash 'Manage add-ons' page (in the admin area) should only display add-ons from the Marketplace that have been marked as compatible with Stash 3.0. Incompatible add-ons won't be available in the list.

However, if you are upgrading from Stash 2.x to Stash 3.0, you should be aware that some existing installed add-ons may be incompatible with Stash 3.0. After upgrading, you should go to Admin > Manage add-ons, look for messages of this form, and follow the advice to update:

If no newer version is available, the add-on must be disabled.

Custom add-ons

Please note that your custom locally-developed plugins may be affected by the API removals in Stash 3.0. You will need to update your custom plugins if you want those to work with Stash 3.0. See the Stash API changelog for details of the deprecated APIs.

Third-party add-ons

You'll need to check on Atlassian Marketplace for the compatibility status of any 3rd-party add-ons that you use.

Third-party add-on developers have been given an Early Access Program (EAP) build of Stash 3.0 in advance of release, and many have already updated their add-ons to be compatible. Add-ons must be explicitly marked by the publisher as compatible with Stash 3.0 for them to appear in 'Manage add-ons' page in Stash. This is NOT automatic as was the case with previous minor releases such as 2.10 and 2.11.Atlassian can not support issues involving third party Add-ons that are incompatible with Stash 3.0; such support cases must be directed to the third-party publisher of the add-on. See Managing apps.

Atlassian add-ons

All of the Atlassian add-ons for Stash that are available from the Atlassian Marketplace have been updated to be compatible with Stash 3.0. If you use any of these in your Stash installation you'll need to update them to the Stash 3.0 compatible version.

Stash 2.9 update notes

Pull Request Ref Optimization

When you first start Stash after upgrading to Stash 2.9 a repository update task runs that optimizes the pull request refs for all repositories managed by Stash. It's important that you do not interrupt this update process. You can track the progress of this in the Stash logs. See STASH-3469 - Getting issue details...STATUS .

Stash 2.7 update notes

Repository System Information Plugin is now deprecated

The functionality of the repository system information plugin has now been moved into core Stash. The plugin will still work for Stash 2.x versions but is redundant as of Stash 2.7.

MySQL default isolation level

Stash 2.7.x uses READ_COMMITTED instead of the MySQL default isolation level (REPEATABLE_READ). This can result in exceptions when installing or upgrading to 2.7.x, if binary logging is enabled in your MySQL server.More details and a fix can be found in this KB article.

Known issues

Stash 2.1 update notes

Known issues

Install location for third-party libraries

As of Stash 2.1 you can install third-party libraries and jar files, such as the MySQL JDBC driver, into <Stash home directory>/lib. This has the advantage that files in this location are not overwritten, and lost, when you update Stash.

Microsoft SQL Server JDBC driver

Stash 2.1 now uses the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC driver to access Microsoft SQL Server, instead of using the jTDS driver. In most cases, Stash will automatically swap to using the Microsoft driver on update and no configuration is required.

If Stash was configured to use Microsoft SQL Server by manually entering a JDBC URL, please refer to this guide.

Stash 2.0 update notes

This section provides specific notes for upgrading to Stash 2.0. See also the update steps section above.

Tomcat

For Stash 2.0, Tomcat has been updated from version 6 to 7. As part of that update, the server.xml file has changed. If you have customized server.xml (for example, for port, path or hostname), you can not simply copy your own version across to the updated Stash; you must reapply your customizations to the server.xml file for the new version of Stash.

If you were running Stash as a Windows service and are upgrading from 1.x to 2.x you will need to reinstall the Stash service to make it use Tomcat 7.

To uninstall the Stash service you need to execute following commands from <STASH DISTRIBUTION DIR>\bin:

> net stop <service name>
> service.bat uninstall <service name>

You can call this command without the service name if you installed the Stash service with a default name.

Perl

Stash 2.0 requires Perl for its branch permission functionality. If Perl is unavailable, Stash 2.0 will not start.

On Windows machines, Perl will only have been installed by the Git installer if the correct install option was chosen. See Installing and upgrading Git.

Existing Git hooks

In order to support Branch Permissions, Stash 2.0 moves existing hooks in the pre-receive and post-receive folders under <Stash home directory>/data/repositories/NNNN/hooks (where NNN is the internal repository id) to .../hooks/pre-receive.d/10_custom or .../hooks/post-receive.d/10_custom. Consequently, custom hooks that use relative path names (e.g. "./foo.sh" or "../dir/foo.sh") will be broken by the update to Stash 2.0.

Deprecation of Internet Explorer 8

Support for Internet Explorer 8 is deprecated from the release of Stash 2.0. The official end-of-support date is yet to be determined. See Supported platforms for details.

Known issues

Check for known issues and troubleshooting

If something is not working correctly after you have completed the steps above to update your Stash installation, please check for known Stash issues and try troubleshooting your update as described below:

Bitbucket Server Knowledge Base. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Stash after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information in the Bitbucket Server Knowledge Base.

If you encounter a problem during the update and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.